Reviews

Whispers and Lies by Joy Fielding

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novelesque_life's review against another edition

5.0

4.5 STARS

"A single, middle-aged woman's peaceful Florida beachfront life is shattered by the arrival of a mysterious younger woman in her neighbourhood." (From Amazon)

This novel reminds me of an old 1940s thriller - hints of Patricia Highsmith and Rear Window. Very good suspense!

alexauthorshay's review

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

I actually bought this book by mistake. I knew there was a Joy Fielding book on my TBR and thought it was this one, but it was actually "Lost"; the copy at my library combines that book with this one and I didn't notice they were actually 2 distinct titles. After reading the back of this one though, I decided to give it a try. Making myself read it turned out to be almost as bad as pulling my own teeth out.

I would classify this book as (as much as I don't like to use this as a genre label) "chick lit" mystery/thriller, or perhaps domestic. I use chick lit specifically because there was definitely focus within this book on clothes/makeup/fashion; romantic partners/relationships were a large part of the plot (but did not have that much of an impact on it), and the majority of the book was spent following Terry and her new friend Alison as they went shopping, did each other's makeup, admired jewelry, and shared drinks and bonded.

The mystery/thriller aspect is essentially absent from the first 85% of the book, and then crammed into every page from that point until the end. Every couple pages, Terry will remind us something horrible is going to happen by saying "I didn't know then" or "if only I'd noticed". This begins on page one. It was annoying by page 15. I wanted to throw the book in the garbage by page 50. There are moments throughout the briefly raise the tension, like a mystery man threateningly calling Terry, and weird moments that you can't quite explain and so become suspicious like Terry does, but overall it's quite a low-stakes and no-building-momentum story, and the majority of what happens in the book is not that important to the plot.

Terry as a character herself is a bit annoying. I'm not sure if it's her style or Fielding's as an author, but the tendency was to double or triple explain every moment of the story; a character would say something, the dialogue tag would further explain why it was said and the way it was said, and then Terry would make a comment on it or slip into some daydream of a memory that has nothing to do with the current plot and think about that thing for several paragraphs. Unfortunately dialogue is quite abundant in this book so these instances happened almost constantly. It felt a bit like someone trying to take an adult novel and dumb it down to make a children's version of it. This is not helped by the passiveness of Terry as a character or the constant use of "I felt"/"I saw" etc, instead of describing those things directly for a more active read.

The only reason this book gets 2 stars and not 1 is because of the ending. It was not good, and in fact is one of the most cliche and overused twists I can possibly think of. After finishing this book I was very irritated that I had wasted so much time on it when it had turned out so dumb and predictable. That said, until I read the lines that reveal everything, I didn't see it coming. Fielding does a decent job of making every character unreliable I suppose. But the reveal, because of its cliche nature, did not make me think "damn I didn't see that coming" but "I should have seen this coming from miles away". I'm putting it down to the fact that I began skim-reading pretty early on and had such long gaps between reading sessions that I didn't remember enough clues to put everything together before then. It actually reminded me a lot of another terrible book I've read, Safe With Me by K.L. Slater, in which the entire plot seems engineered into existence just to give reason for the ending to occur, an ending that is simply melodramatic and unoriginal.

It also reminded me of that book because of the twist revolving around a protagonist who is not revealed to be unreliable until the plot twist, and them being unreliable IS the twist.

When done well, that kind of twist can be very satisfying, but in this book I could almost feel at a chapter break the moment the story shifted and Terry changed completely as a character, too much in too short a time.